"EMSO ERIC is crucial for obtaining datasets for long-term monitoring of Europe's seas and oceans. These data are essential for addressing the impacts of climate change, but also for mitigating natural risks and enhancing biodiversity protection," said Robert-Jan Smits, Director General of the European Commission's Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (RTD), addressing the heart of the innovation represented by the European consortium EMSO ERIC, a marine science research infrastructure consisting of a network of automated monitoring systems distributed across Europe's seas. EMSO ERIC, headquartered in Rome and whose launch event was held at the Stampa Estera, was established under the auspices of the European Commission. In fact, explains Robert-Jan Smits, “The EU has contributed €3,9 million in funding to the preparatory phase of this new European infrastructure, and is providing further support of €8,6 million for its implementation phase through Horizon 2020, the European Union's research and innovation programme.” The EMSO ERIC presentation event also saw the participation of Carlo Doglioni, President of theIstituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), the Italian lead institution for EMSO ERIC, noted that such a result demonstrates "at a time when the ideal of a United Europe seems to be called into question, the necessary and indispensable European dimension for any successful scientific collaboration." The INGV President also highlighted the importance of a marine observation infrastructure because "the ocean environment experiences the same phenomena that dramatically affect us from time to time, such as disastrous earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and it is also where tsunamis are generated." Referring to recent events, the INGV President also explained that "extreme climate events, such as those that recently hit Italy and which we expect to occur increasingly frequently, are an integral part of global climate change, in which the ocean plays a key regulatory role."
Fulvio Esposito, technical secretariat for research policies - Department for higher education and research MIUR, recalled how the Ministry of Education, University and Research "has decided to adopt the strengthening of research infrastructures as one of the main axes of the National Research Program 2015/2020. In this framework EMSO, a European-level research infrastructure with headquarters in Italy, at INGV, and with its network of prestigious research institutions active in the field of ocean observation, can provide an unprecedented mass of high-quality data , freely available to scientists, but not only to them. Therefore EMSO has the potential to produce socio-economic benefits, to interact with other Italian research centres, such as the National Technology Clusters, thus giving more sense to the support of our ministry to EMSO itself". The EMSO ERIC launch event also saw the intervention of Paolo Favali, EMSO spokesman, who explained the past, present and future of EMSO ERIC to the audience of Italian and foreign journalists, and Richard Lampitt, of the National Oceanography Center UK, who holds the position of Chairman of the EMSO ERIC Members' Assembly.
EMSO ERIC
The European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water-column Observatory (EMSO) European Research Infrastructure Consortium was created by eight countries: France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Its headquarters are in Rome and it actively promotes European scientific research in the marine environment, under the auspices of the European Commission. INGV, Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia is the leading body of the Consortium for Italy.
The infrastructure managed by the European consortium is on a continental scale, consists of long-term and high resolution observation systems, with near real-time monitoring, and is composed of 11 deep-sea submarine observatories providing large data streams and 4 sites for shallow water testing, for monitoring environmental processes affecting the geosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere and their interactions. The sites are located in key locations from the Arctic to the Atlantic to the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, thus forming a large-scale European infrastructure serving the international scientific community. This system enables the collection of valuable data on natural hazards, climate change and marine ecosystems.
The ocean observatories, in continuous development, are designed to communicate with multiple research platforms, allowing a continuous flow of data from the ocean and interactivity with the instruments both through direct connections and through satellite transmissions or via the Internet.
The scientific context
The oceans make up a major part of the surface of our planet, 70%, yet this proportion is not reflected in scientific research: there are still many aspects not investigated and not fully understood of the delicate relationship between the oceans and our ecosystem. These unexplored aspects take on even more weight when one considers the pressure and marine changes due to human activities. By further expanding the scenario, the study of the oceans allows us not only to better understand physical, biological and chemical processes, but also climatic and geological ones, the sense of this is evident by looking at the map of the world's faults. Basic questions for our future on biodiversity, on climate evolution, on how to live with natural disasters, cannot stop at the borders of the emerged lands.
Scientific observation has opened up this front for years, creating a global network of oceanic observatories starting in the 90s that focus their activities on the seabed and subsoil, as well as on the water column, but we are still far from a vision overview of what is happening in our oceans. The sector is promising, as going forward it will allow us to understand epochal issues such as the influence of the oceans on the climate, the dynamics of the marine lithosphere as well as a more precise view of the composition of the earth's crust, natural and human-induced changes on the coastal environment, ecosystem dynamics and biodiversity. With marine research it will be possible for researchers to collect quality data and map over the years natural phenomena such as underwater volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, ocean currents, tsunamis, seabed instability, the biological, chemical and physicist of violent climatic events.
Years of experience in the sector have created a network linked to numerous international programmes, a global infrastructure to which to connect new experiences under development, where the main players are Japan, the United States, Canada, Europe, but other realities are emerging, such as China.
In general, the continuous and global monitoring of the oceans is a challenge of importance and difficulty comparable to space exploration: careful study and optimization of spaces to make a single infrastructure useful for multiple scientific objectives, as well as suitable for the use of a large and heterogeneous community of scholars, including biologists, oceanographers, geophysicists, chemists and engineers.
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